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IYDIYD 1
The party did a lot of interesting information-gathering today. On the question the magistrate wants you to answer-- finding proof to implicate the cult in these deaths-- you have as yet made little progress. (You do now have the name of Donaway's dealer, Greeley, to investigate further.) You learned a TON of other stuff, though. Because the session was so packed and people were sometimes doing different things from each other, I'm going to recap all the ones I remember for you here: 1) Donaway died in the Murder of Crows shiver den, and his corpse was thrown to the pigs there. How did it get from there to the intersection where you fought with it? 2) Donaway was having financial problems, which he suddenly overcame right before his death after fencing a bunch of stuff that he and his new gang found somewhere (the junkies thought he looted some old temple somewhere, but weren't very certain about that provenance.) The items included a gold brooch shaped like a butterfly, silverware stamped with the initials "JW", and a big old book which he intended to sell to the booksellers at the market square. 3) Speak With Dead apparently doesn't work on the victims of the shiver deaths. Morgana says a witch stole their souls. 4) The magistrate says the cult of Sholaith may have been poisoning the well. The druid used alchemy to test the coffee from the coffee vendors, which came up clean. 5) Many people in the Grey Citadel neighborhood have been suffering from nightmares, sometimes escalating into night terrors from which they wake in a state of drained exhaustion. They usually seem to take place on the city streets, one woman specifically cited Stonehill Road between the butcher and the tailor. 6) There have apparently been many deaths in the Grey Citadel neighborhood. You have not yet really had the chance to ask about any of them but Donaway's and Gravil's. 7) You intercepted a letter from the mayor to the magistrate refusing to let the Paladins attack the cult compound due to lack of proof and instructing him to downplay supernatural elements and declare all strange deaths shiver overdoses to avoid panicking the population. 8) You investigated the disappearance/death of Gravil the social worker. You didn't find any evidence of a break-in at his house, only a mirror with a magical dweomer on it which displayed the words "IF YOU DIE IN YOUR DREAMS" backwards in bloody letters. 9) Jon sensed an unusual thinness in the Veil between worlds in Hastenport, resulting in dimensional instability of a type even he with his extensive extraplanar studies has never heard of before. 10) You encountered several instances where the Veil seemed particularly thin to Jon and you felt a distorting of reality, received strange visions, and encountered eerie creatures akin to, but not exactly the same as, a haunting. One was the bloody mirror in Gravil's house; another was a scarab that animated and whispered "the shadows are coming" in the Apothecary; a third was the ethereal spiderwebs and vomit swarms in the alley in the Shingles; and the fourth was the intersection near the inn where you fought the fog creature. 11) You talked to the paralyzed dream seer Morgana and learned about "lucid dreaming" from her. She said that unlike ordinary people, lucid dreamers die in reality if they die in their dreams, and that shiver's hallucinogenic effects could cause the same thing to happen to untrained dreamers. At least, you think that was what she said. She's helpful but kind of cryptic. She also said Donaway's soul was stolen by "the cult's deadly witch" and that she would try to learn more about the strange haunt-like effects you were seeing tonight. Jon offered to help guard her body while she dreams. 12) Aler has a meeting with the drow alchemist Vanessa tonight. She asked him to come alone. 13) Jon has a meeting with a hooker named Jen tonight. Business has been terrible for her lately (everyone is spending their entertainment budget on shiver rather than prostitutes.) It's about 3PM game time. Enough time to investigate more leads before your evening appointments. By the way, 8th-level characters using dozens of Cure Light Wounds charges to heal their wounds after battle turns out to be, while cost-effective, a huge time-waster. I'm going to rule that instead of rolling 1d6+1 every darn time you use those things, each charge will always heal the average damage of 4. So from now on, if you want to heal 32 points of damage to the cavalier, knock off 8 charges off your wand and be done. Larry, you will still need to make Use Magic Device checks at DC 20 each time you want to do so as you are not a divine magic user. Practically speaking, that's just going to make you use up charges faster (if you roll two failures, it will just take you 10 charges instead of 8 to heal those 32 points.) Good? Sweet dreams, Laura